


Chosen; Or, Stiles the Werewolf Slayer

by goodboots



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Crack, Gen, M/M, Standard Kate Argent Warning, Stiles as the Slayer, Teen Wolf BtVS AU, approach with caution maybe, crack everywhere, just go with it, or don't I'm not the boss of you, yes I know it's supposed to only be girls that get called shhhhhh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-04
Updated: 2013-06-30
Packaged: 2017-12-04 06:54:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/707833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodboots/pseuds/goodboots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Which Stiles is the Slayer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Surprise

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure someone else in the fandom got there before me, and yet also surprised this isn't the most-used trope, because COME ON.

Stiles gets the Call late.

Chris says most Slayers get it younger, like around thirteen or fourteen, and even then they've already been training for most of their lives so they know what's going to happen, what to expect. Stiles is newly seventeen the day the transfer girl walks up to him in the hallway at school, pointedly ignoring Scott's doe-eyes, and tells him they need to talk, brings him home and sits down at her dining room table with her dad and they explain his big special destiny.

Stiles is seventeen when he gets called, and his best friend is a werewolf, and his father is the Sheriff, so he's working over some hurdles.

He's also the first Slayer in a couple decades who isn't already a member of the Argent Werewolf Hunting Empire, as he's come to think of it, but Chris and the hunters have been pretty great about that. If he had to move to some crappy town to train some dumbass teenager how to fight the creatures of the night, he might be a little bitter about it, but then he suspects Chris doesn't have much else going on in his life. Sometimes, when he's on patrol with Allison and she has her bow strung and aimed before he's even stopped talking long enough for his senses to pick up the prick of fear that means a threat is nearby, he has to wonder if she was the one they were banking on to be called as the Slayer.

He's both sad for her and weirdly proud that she's not. It means she gets to live a long life, and she deserves one.

Stiles, on the other hand, has been told in no uncertain terms that he's going to die young and horribly.

***

"First string, come on," Scott's whining at him. They're in the locker room, changing out of their lacrosse uniforms. "You have to play, Coach won't put you in ever again if you don't show up this time."

"Okay, I hear what you're saying. But also, sirens in the woods," Stiles points out reasonably, shucking off his shirt and pulling a clean t-shirt out of his bag. "Priorities."

"Yeah," Scott deflates a little, "I got it. Your dad's on shift tonight?"

"Until dawn. I'm going to stay out and shut these things down. I'll try to make it to class tomorrow but I really doubt I'll get another chance to stay out all night."

"Allison going too?" Scott asks, a little too hopefully. Stiles wants absolutely no part of this pathetic crush his best friend is harbouring; it's bad enough now, he doesn't know what Scott would say if he knew Allison asked about him just as much as he does about her.

"Nope, she's on a retreat with Chris until Monday. Just me," Stiles says, and hopes Scott will leave it at that.

"What about--"

"No."

"Nothing?"

Stiles zips up his lacrosse bag, hefts it up on one shoulder. Funny how he used to think it was so impossibly heavy. He shakes his head.

"Haven't seen him since we exorcised that poltergeist in Beacon Heights." That was nearly a month ago, but it doesn't need saying.

Scott's eyebrows draw together.

"You call me if he starts bothering you again," he says. "He was hanging around you way too much before we found out--it wasn't safe."

Stiles starts heading for the door. He's heard all this before.

"Derek doesn't know where Peter is, Scott. The rising-from-the-grave thing was a little unprecedented."

"That's not what I mean!" Scott calls after him.

***

There's a werewolf in his bedroom.

Stiles doesn't bother turning the lights on--both of them can see plenty well by the moonlight drifting in through the open window. Speaking of which:

"That was locked," Stiles says, pointing at the window-latch. "I remember locking it before school so you couldn't come in here and do the stalker routine. I know I probably smell extra-delicious to you guys, but get serious."

He's mostly joking, knows he's in no danger of the bite. Or, well--

"Slayers can't turn," Chris had explained that first afternoon in the Argent dining room. "They're allergic to the bite. It will still kill you, of course, but you don't have to worry about becoming a werewolf. It's not possible."

So yeah, Derek could bite him. He could tear him limb from limb, rip his throat out, whatever. But Stiles is the one here with preternaturally amazing reflexes and sharp aim, and there are four different kinds of wolfsbane hidden in this room, not to mention the tincture his arrows are laced with.

Derek's really the one taking the risk, the way he keeps showing up to help, and they both know it. He just wishes he could figure out why.

"It was locked," Derek agrees, one corner of his mouth quirked into an unlikely smile. "The one in the hallway wasn't."

Stiles sighs instead of kicking himself, because it's five in the morning and he just shot down a troupe of sirens without any backup at all. He's too tired for the banter right now.

"Haven't seen you around in a while," he says instead, getting right to the point. "I thought you left town."

"Don't think that," Derek says, leaning back against the windowframe. He's wearing a shirt Stiles has never seen before, dark green, and his jeans don't appear to have any blood or dirt on them. He looks good, Stiles notes, then thinks _stop it_ really hard at himself.

"You didn't?"

"I didn't, and I'm not going to. This is my territory."

Stiles sets his lacrosse bag full of weapons down on the floor by his desk. Derek clearly isn't in a hurry to leave so screw it, he's going to start getting ready for bed. If he grabs a couple solid hours sleep he might still make it to first period math.

"It's not, actually," he points out, grabs a fresh shirt from his dresser. He clicks on the desk lamp so they're not having this conversation in total darkness; that feels weirdly personal and again, _nope, not thinking about that_. "The hellmouth is my problem, not that I don't appreciate you popping up out of nowhere with the cryptic yet oddly helpful information."

"Beacon Hills has always been Hale territory," Derek says, and by now he's just repeating it. Stiles must've heard it a thousand times. He's always insisting the Hale claim predates the Hellmouth opening up under the high school.

Something new occurs to Stiles now, though. "Hey, did your family know? About our typical neighbourhood nefarious supernatural activity, I mean. Your parents ever mention it?"

Stiles knows the Hale family were a pack of largely peaceful born werewolves who snapped about ten years ago and started biting humans. Hunters had to deal with the situation, which apparently involved a lot of bloodshed and the burning down of their massive house out near the Preserve. Derek, his sister and a comatose uncle were the only survivors, and the Hunters let them leave town under pain of the code; they'd never hurt any humans themselves. 

It wasn't until not-so-comatose Uncle Peter turned out to be biting people--biting Scott, and that's enough reason for Stiles to hate him--that Derek showed up again, bringing first-hand werewolf knowledge that is actually usually better than anything in Chris Argent's dusty old books. 

"Not to me," Derek says, looking a little green around the gills. Nervous, almost. He's never looked like that before, none of the other times he's broken into Stiles' bedroom.

"Hey, sorry," Stiles starts, looking down at the note he left on his desk sometime last week--MATH TEST THURSDAY, DON'T FORGET, god damn it--says, "I shouldn't have--if you don't wanna talk about it, I won't--sorry."

The thing is, he and Derek went through a lot last year, and now they're kind of friends? Scott hates it and Allison doesn't get it and Chris absolutely cannot ever know, but Stiles kind of likes having him around, and he should know by now how much Derek hates talking about his sad dead family, even if some of them were apparently psycho killers.

Stiles doesn't mention any of that, because despite the locked windows and carefully cultivated indifference, he doesn't want to make the guy feel unwelcome. This last month of radio silence has been grating. He's gotten used to Derek showing up, stupid inept Alpha werewolf saving his ass or needing his own saved. It's kind of comforting, and he's start to expect it.

What he's not expecting is what happens next. He turns looks up from the desk and turns back to the window, and Derek's suddenly a lot closer. Dere's right up in his personal space, close enough to touch, and he does. He  leans forward and kisses him.

Stiles might have thought about this a little--not, like, in any way that's possible or likely, just wondered what it would be like, per se. It's the same as his dreams, really, the ones where he's sometimes a werewolf running through the Preserve. Impossible and reckless and something he's never going to write down in the daily log Chris makes him keep, though that would be one hell of an entry: _Killed two sirens, saved some campers, talked to Deaton about faerie biology, made out with my mortal enemy_.

And it's--Jesus fucking Christ, it’s actually happening. Derek’s hands are curled around his biceps, his chest pressing close. Then Derek makes a low noise in the back of his throat that Stiles takes a good ten seconds too long to interpret as a growl, and then he jumps the fuck away.

"What the hell," he says. His heart is hammering, and he knows Derek can hear it. He wants to say it's just from fear, but that's not true. "Why did you do that?"

Derek's eyes fall shut like he can't bear to look at him.

"You know why," he says on an exhale. His hands are shaking, Stiles can't look away.

"I really don't."

"I--Jesus, Stilles, what do you want me to say? I want--"

There's a noise downstairs, and Derek freezes, eyes wide. Stiles glances at the alarm clock by his bed. It's just after six o'clock in the morning; his dad's home.

He acts on instinct, reaches out and closes the bedroom door, turns the lock.

"That could have been--"

He's alone in his bedroom, and the window's wide open.

"--Bad," he finishes, flopping down on the bed. "Worse."

***

The thing about being the Slayer is, there are so many _rules_.

Rules about patrolling, rules about training, rules about what he can reasonably kill and what kind of supernatural beasties he needs probable cause to decapitate. Rules about _who he can tell_ —Scott’s really not supposed to know, but once they figured out he was a werewolf it seemed like a good idea to let him in on the secret. The Sheriff still doesn’t know, no one else at school apart from Derek’s failed attempt at a pack.

And then there’s the rules they don’t tell him, don’t they even need to mention, because it’s implicit and unspoken and just fucking obvious that the Slayer really shouldn’t be fantasizing about his werewolf stalker. Right? That would be—bad. Really bad, almost as bad as, oh, dreaming about being a wolf. 

***

On his eighteenth birthday, Stiles celebrates surviving his first year as a Slayer by breaking every rule. He finds Derek.

He's in the Hale house again--he's been repairing it, it looks like, some of the cross-beams replaced, a new pane of glass in the front door. It's patchwork and unpolished but solid except for the solarium, still more solar than it should be, where the holey ceiling lets in shafts of moonlight. That's where he finds him, curled on the futon he set up out there, blanket pooled over his knees and a book in his hands, dimly illuminated by a half-dozen cheap candle lanterns. Derek always seems realer the closer they get to the woods,

He looks up, not startled but surprised to see Stiles sanding there, and his eyes flash scarlet briefly. If he had anything like a pack, they'd be sprawled out alongside him on the bed, but there's no one else here. His meager attempts to turn the local teenage delinquents got put down pretty fast once Stiles accepted his call or whatever, and Erica and Boyd are still missing, the Lahey kid in foster care and avoiding Stiles' gaze in school.

Deaton tells him Derek Hale must be the only Alpha in history to have survived this long without a pack to give him stability. Alphas need something to live for, and Stiles has been wondering all year what Derek's might be.

The way Derek's gone still, he doesn't have to wonder too hard.

"I want--" he starts, and Derek stands up and moves closer, his eyes shining scarlet for a moment, flickering back into their deep green and his breath catches.

They're both waiting on Stiles to finish that statement, rooted in place until he says _you to leave town, leave me alone_ , or just _you_.

He lays hands flat on Derek's shoulders--they're nearly the same height, barely an inch between them, but Stiles is in boots and Derek barefoot so he has the advantage--crowds him against the door and says, "I want," and that's enough.

Derek surges forward for his mouth, Stiles grips his shoulders, his forearms, any part of him he can get. They fall together, fall back onto the bed and it's nothing like he though it would be.

Stiles kissed Lydia once, when he was fresh on the roll of his newfound strength and his social stock was skyrocketing in the wake of Allison's apparent friendship and new-girl mystique; kissed Lydia once after a lacrosse championship, then never did it again. He was a little scared, honestly, that this would be the same thing, and the fantasy would be better than the reality.

He shouldn't have worried. He thinks he could kiss Derek for a hundred years, just kissing, and never get tired of it. Could spend the rest of his life mapping the planes of his body, the curve of his waist and arms, the taste of his skin and smell of his neck, the feel of him stretching Stiles out with his hands and tongue and cock and taking, taking, giving so much--Stiles could spend forever doing this, and it wouldn't be nearly enough time.

They sleep in the solarium that night, curled on the mattress under a pile of blankets.

On his eighteenth birthday, Derek wrapped loosely around him, his whole body aching from a long day of training and a longer night of letting himself have everything he's been dreaming of for months, Stiles thinks, _I could have this. I could have this one thing._


	2. Innocence

Stiles is wrong, of course. He's usually wrong, and it comes to a head the next morning. He wakes up and they're not alone in the house anymore.

It’s just past sunrise, and Stiles has no time to regret last night or process what happened, because there's a voice rising out of the kitchen that doesn't belong to Derek.

He's alone on the mattress, all the candles burned out into waxy stubs, and he scrubs a hand over his face and hears it, then moves quickly. He shimmies into his jeans under the blanket, pulls his shirt off the bookshelf as quietly as he can manage. He's strong now, yeah, but he's also got some self-preservation instinct left over from being flaily and weak. He crouches along the wall, behind the door into the kitchen, and figures he can jump anyone who tries to take him by surprise.

If she's human, she'll never know he's here. If she's not human, she already knows.

"Think about it, Der," the girl--woman--says, and Stiles gets a glimpse of tousled brown hair out through the cracked and dusty windowpane set in the charred wooden door. "A new pack, that's just what you need to shake off these springtime blues--oh, didn't you just miss me?"

"Get out of my house," Derek responds, and Stiles knows from his tone he's got his teeth out.

"Well, if you feel that strongly about it," she says, fake indignance and the sound of heels clicking on the hardwood. "See you around."

Hears the front door slam shut, and Stiles stands up and walks into the kitchen. Derek's shirtless beside the counter, a plastic tray in front of him.

In the daylight it's easier to see the place, and Stiles is kind of surprised at the changes since he was last here. There's been an obvious attempt at cleaning, and everything's hanging straighter on the hinges, big chunks of ruined drywall ripped down in the livingroom. Derek's been trying to fix things in here.

"You're awake," Derek says, face carefully neutral. Stiles classifies it that was because he knows now what Derek's other expressions look like, how his face colours when he's feeling vulnerable and joyous, laid out beneath Stiles with his mouth hanging open, panting, and fingers clutching at the sheets--

"I'm awake," Stiles agrees, and doesn't come any closer. "Who's your new beta?"

Derek sets the tray down too hard, rattles the spoons. There's two bowls of cereal on it, Stiles notices, muesli and two shiny apples, and two glasses of water. Jesus Christ.

"She's not my beta.”

 "She's somebody's beta. You're supposed to tell me when there's a new wolf in town," and yeah, let's go with that, that's totally why his heart is hammering in his chest.

"Now you think you know me?" Derek says, a growl under the words, and the urge to run picks up in Stile's spine, makes him want to straighten and stretch.

The Slayer instinct is always fight or flight, Chris told him, and most of the time he does his sacred duty or whatever and picks fight. Instead he stays very still, and says: "You wouldn't let another wolf in here unless you were responsible for them, I know that much."

Derek doesn't respond, just looks down at the counter with his shoulders in a heavy slump. Stiles can see a teeth mark on the front edge of his bicep, remembers putting it there when Derek first moved into him, leaning down and over and caging his body in.

"Tell me she isn't a were and I'll believe you," he offers, although that's a lie and he's certain she is. "If she is--did Peter do it? Because I can tell Chris, I can explain for you so he won't retaliate. She'd fall under the amnesty--"

"Stiles, stop," Derek says, looking pained. "It's not that simple, and she's not Peter's bite. I--Her name is Kate."

That takes him a minute, because in the vast dark history of his town there are a lot of unsolved mysteries, a lot of disappearances and suspicious deaths, unsolved. He never wondered about the supposedly solved ones. Then he thinks:

Kate. Kate Argent.

"She's not dead," Stiles says, feeling so stupid. Feeling sick. "She's a wolf now."

The air in the room is too cold, all of a sudden, and he looks around for his shoes while his head starts exploding. Leaves the room and retreats to the solarium, finds them and the rest of his clothes and barely registers Derek following him.

"I didn't turn her," he says, insistent. He's leaning in the doorway and looking mildly trapped. "I was a fucking sixteen-year-old kid, Stiles. I was a _beta._ I couldn't have done it if I'd wanted to."

"Someone did, though, someone turned her and do you understand what this means?" Oh, no, they've hit the hysteria point of the conversation. Stiles sucks in a deep breath and says, a little quieter, "Your family," and is _that_ ever the wrong thing to say.

"My family would _never_ \--" Derek insists with a growl, then breaks off. His hands are clenched at his side, shaky. "We were born wolves, and we never turned anyone who didn't ask for it and know completely what they were getting into. The bite is supposed to be a gift, not a curse."

"I know you believe that," he says, feeling diplomatic, "but not all born wolves operate that way, not everyone abides by the code."

"The code is for hunters, now," Derek snarls at him. "They broke it first, when they set the fire.”

 Stiles doesn't know what to say to that, because Derek never brings up the fire. It's the one part of the Hale pack history Stiles has never understood--not just about why a peaceful pack would start randomly killing, but why the Hunters first course of action was to burn them out.

 "The code might have a point," he says instead, feeling petty. This is not how he expected his first morning-after to go.

 ***

Stiles goes home, scales the tree outside his room and slips through the unlatched window. His dad's on overnights all week long, so there's no flash of guilt over leaving his house open and undefended. He crawls into bed fully dressed and thinks:

The first time he met Derek they were in the woods, and Scott had no idea who the guy yelling at them to get off his property was but Stiles remembered the Hales, the dozen siblings and cousins marching through the years in his mother's kindergarten classroom. Remembered Derek as slightly more than a name attached to Beacon Hills' insanely morbid history. 

Later, he would learn the rest: that the Hales were werewolves, born wolves with a long history of their own. That they had enjoyed an uneasy but lasting truce with the Hunters, the Slayer and the Council, until they turned on it and started murdering innocent citizens, failed turnings, what must've been an attempt to forcibly grow the pack.

"I though born weres didn't usually go around throwing out the bite," Stiles had said, slumped at the Argent kitchen table after another marathon research session.

"They don't," Chris agreed. "And the Hales were always self-sustaining in terms of pack size, all those kids running around the Preserve. We don't rightly know what made them snap and start the biting, but it's all right here," he indicates the books open before him, the full-color photos of mangy-looking wolves and bruised bloody human bodies laid out on marble slabs. Post-mortems rendered in vicious colour.

Later, curled on his own bed and remembering the feel of Derek's sheets under his skin, his stubbly chin scraping over his shoulder as he arched off the bed, Stiles thinks that this is another instance where he's been asking the wrong questions. He never asked for any names.

 ***

"I need you to tell me what you know about Kate," he asks Allison then next day after school. He's driving the Jeep and trying not to look too desperate; she's silent, steadfastly keeping her eyes out the window, like he doesn't know she's thinking about Scott missing from his usual place in the back seat.

Chris found out yesterday, saw them walking home together from the diner while Stiles was speeding over to his werewolf not-boyfriend’s burnt out house. He’s not going to take the blame—he told them it was a stupid idea to get involved:

“You’re still an Argent and he’s still a werewolf,” he said, when they started the mutual flirtation months ago. “There’s no way this is going to end well.”

But there’s a low simmering guilt settling in his stomach. And he hates to do this to her, so recently broken-hearted, but she's his best option, his source of living history. She knows the inner workings of the Council like the back of her hand, knows the sprawling and intertwined history of the Hunters and Slayers just as well.

She looks over at him slowly. "What do you need to know?"

***

On Saturday after the last lacrosse game of the season, Stiles takes down three ghouls who've set up shop in the abandoned theatre, stops a mugging in progress and darts away before anyone can recognize him as the Sherriff’s kid, and interrupts a wannabe witch trying to summon a vengeance demon in the town's oldest church.

He hasn't seen Derek in over a week, but he feels eyes on him as he makes his way through the last graveyard and starts the walk home. 

***

On Sunday morning, Stiles makes coffee for his dad, grabs his backpack full of werewolf reasearch and gets ready to head out to the Hale house.

He looks in the hallway mirror a long minute before he leaves, thinks about what’s happening there. He’s changed since freshmen year, he doesn’t even want to think about what an obnoxious no-nothing snot he was back then; he likes to think he’s matured in a couple other ways since he got Called.

His clothes suffered a little, at first, all his prized funny t-shirts bloodstained and ripped. He’s mostly switched to dark colored v-necks now—easier to fight in and wash blood out of, and his jeans are a holding up a little better.

He looks in the mirror at the tall, pale guy with hair falling over his eyes (he hasn’t had it buzzed since his barber turned out to be a warlock with a grudge, goes to Allison’s salon now and will kill anyone who distributes that information), the guy in the blue cardigan and leather jacket, all part of the collegiate look Lydia’s been cultivating in his closet. The guy who isn’t shaking with ADD, the one who got steady grades and almost no sleep all last year, the one who got early acceptance to MIT even if he is going to commute to University of California at Beacon two towns over with Scott instead next fall.

Stiles looks at that guy, and thinks, _I could get someone else. Not anyone, but someone nice, someone normal._

But that’s not what he wants and he knows it, too.


	3. Becoming

"I know what she did," Stiles says. It’s still pretty early still, overcast outside and keeping the solarium dim. Stiles wants to light a couple of the candles but that would probably be overstepping.

Derek doesn't look up from the book in his hands, only says: "Of course you do. You're smart, and you've got all the information in the world at your fingertips. Do I want to know what corner of the internet led you to your latest theory?"

Stiles drops the Beacon Hills High School 2004-2005 yearbook down onto the futon. "She's on page forty-eight," he adds.

Neither of them move to pick the book up, though Derek’s eyes snap to his like a challenge. They both know what's in there. Kate Justice, teacher for eleventh grade AP Math. Derek was something of a calculus savant, apparently, had been bumped up from the other ninth graders.

Stiles had Danny and Lydia holed up the library still, running that name through every police database they could break into, every record or alternate they could match it with.

"She got close to you so she could hurt your family," he says, not quite brave enough to follow through with his theory. "It wasn't a controlled burn, it wasn’t the hunters planning something out. She started the fire on her own."

"She did."

"She faked her own death too."

Derek looks like he’d pay any price to end this conversation, but he only says, "Go on, you're getting close."

"Lydia found a story in one of Deaton's books. She's still translating it, but I think we got the gist. If she had enough blood--" he almost stops, because Derek looks violently ill for a second, then recovers a degree of composure and waves him on. "She used them as a sacrifice to the moon."

Derek’s nodding slowly, agreeably, but says nothing.

"What I don't get is why you haven't killed her, or, I don't know, _talked to Chris yet_."

He shakes his head, looks back at the book cradled in his hands. Stiles knows he’s not reading, and waits.

“The attacks that month were because of a rogue omega. My mother wouldn’t let him in into our pack, she had a bad feeling about him, and he retaliated by killing twelve townspeople.”

Stiles waits for the rest, and he definitely isn’t holding his breath on this at all.

“She and my uncles brought him in to Argent the week before the fire.”

“Chris?” Because no, Chris would have mentioned that.

“Gerard.”

Stiles shudders. That old guy gave him the creeps, and he’s not really all that sorry he died last year in the snake-demon incident.

“It was solved,” Derek goes on, “and I know it’s not in any of their books or records, but we dealt with it. The fire—" His voice catches a little, then he plows through: “there were human children in that house, Stiles. There were werewolf kids who didn’t know how to turn yet, and only a handful of adults who knew how to go through with giving the bite. We were settled, not hurting anybody, and Kate Argent didn’t care. She—“

Stiles winces, because, yes, it’s exactly what he thought. “How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

Stiles tries to imagine that, innocent little fifteen year old Derek.

“There’s, uh, there’s a picture of you on page ninety-three,” he says, stupidly. Grabs it and flicks through to find it when Derek doesn’t move.

It’s kind of blurry, Derek in a lacrosse uniform darting down the field. Stiles sits lightly on the bed, angles it so Derek can see himself.

A minute passes and he says, “I missed you, you know,” and Derek kisses him, and it’s not the same as talking things out, not at all what he meant to do, but it’s so good he can’t stop.

***

They do manage to disengage from their sprawl at some point. They talk most of the morning instead, talk about everything.

Derek makes toast and coffee. All he has in his fridge is raspberry jam and a carton of milk, but Stiles accepts breakfast gratefully and keeps a running commentary on the recent spate of ‘animal attacks’ in the town. It’s nice, having a strategizing break with Derek instead of him just showing up and dropping sudden, enigmatic knowledge. It’s comfortable, easy, and Derek suggests a way their side could be strong enough to beat her.

It’s ludicrous, of course. Tales of her exploits are finally reaching Beacon Hills—she’s made a name for herself, the last few years, even if it’s not the name her family gave her—

Derek suggests in one breath the reason she’s suddenly so much more powerful than the average Slayer, and Stiles scoffs, says, "She can't be a real Slayer, whatever spell she gucked with can be undone. Chris said she was human before, and Argents are allergic to the bite--"

The words are out of his mouth before he stops to think about them, and Derek's staring at him, one eyebrow quirked.

"Argents," Stiles repeats, feeling like an idiot. "But I'm not--"

Derek nods, once, slowly. "You're not an Argent. There are stories about turned Slayers, it can be done. The bite will take, with you. I can--"

"What? Is this going to be a creepy wolf thing?"

He looks pained. "I can smell it, on your skin. It's like static electricity. You'd make a good wolf."

"I make a good Slayer," he counters.

“You do,” Derek says, pulls him close and oh, they’re kissing again. Stiles isn’t opposed to some kissing, the way this week has been going. He allows himself a moment of respite to make out with his werewolf stalker.

Later, they disentangle and sprawl out on the futon. Derek’s spread out underneath him, shirt rucked up where Stiles has been stroking a stretch of skin at his waist.

"There are stories," he says carefully. "Once upon a time, there was a boy who was raised by wolves."

"And the wolves turned on him," Stiles finishes, because Chris has been over this eight thousand times.

"No," Derek counters, softly. He drops a quieting kiss against Stiles’ temple, and something in Stiles' chest unhitches. "No one turned on anyone. He lived with them until he grew into a man, and he loved them as his family. And one day, some human hunters found him and brought him back to their village, because they saw him in the woods and didn’t believe a man would want to live like an animal. They didn’t believe that a man could be happy like that, out under the moon.”

"So the wolves took him back."

"Or the moon did," Derek agrees. "Or he took them back, however you want to look at it. I don't know, it's just a story, but I always thought Slayers were a story too."

"Yeah? What about--"

Shit. He dosen't want to say her name.

Derek doesn't get that reflexive hurt look on his face, though, just says, "She laughed at the story, when I told it to her. She said she wondered if there was some way to get in on that kind of thing, because she wouldn't mind the extra strength and speed. She said she wanted to run with me."

Stiles feels something flare under his skin--fight, fight, run--but it's not for Derek.

"I didn't understand until later, when the police were wondering how the fire spread so fast without an accelerant--"

"--You would have smelled gasoline, you all would have known to get out--"

"She didn't need it. She’d read enough of the books. I let her in here, that was probably the worst thing I ever did, letting her into the library. We were all out for the day, Maisie’s kindergarten graduation and Mom’s birthday, and I let her sneak in the back door and hole up in here reading. Laura always wondered where she got all that information from,” he says, and he’s speaking so quietly Stiles has to strain to hear him. “I never wondered. I practically gave her the plan.”

Stiles had heard about spells to cover scent, tricks to mask presence. He’s never looked into them before, never needed to. It’s always been in his best interest that the enemy knows who he is. It never occurred to him that there was another way to fight back the supernatural, that he could play the monster role himself. It seems, he notes, a little more than underhanded. Makes him feel sick.

"You were fifteen when Kate Argent went missing," he says. "How old was she?"

Derek swallows. "Twenty-four."

Stiles is going to kill her.

***

Derek shows up at the high school three weeks later, three weeks of careful meetings and tender touches. Three weeks of increasingly gruesome animal attacks. He's been driving through the neighboring towns, talking to other packs and seeing if they know anything; this is the last place Stiles expected to find him.

"What are you doing here," Stiles shrieks, leaning out the window of the empty Biology classroom, "are you kidding? Chris is going to kill you--he's going to kill me--"

"The Alphas are back," he says, and Stiles stops because that's not new information but Derek is out of breath, must have run halfway across town from the way he's panting. "She was working with them the whole time, I didn’t—of course she doesn’t want to be a beta, she’d hate it, and—Stiles, they've got the Sheriff."

***

The showdown happens at the Hale property, because she took advantage of Derek’s absence the last few days to set up her little psycho squad in his _house_. There are five semi-feral Alphas in there, lurking at the windows behind Kate Argent, who’s flouncing around the porch and taunting them.

"You wanted this," she tells Derek, canines elongating. “Remember? You said you’d do it when you were older, but I just couldn’t wait. And now look at the pack I’ve made us! You don’t have to be alone anymore.”

“I never wanted this,” Derek says, sounding broken and raw, and Stiles tightens grips his open hand with his free one, the other hefting his crossbow a little higher where it’s trained on Kate’s forehead. It’s going to do fuck all, she’s way too strong for it, but he feels prepared, at least. “I never wanted to make you—“

“Give yourself some credit,” she caws. “You told the stories, let me read those musty old books. You practically make me into this”

"You made yourself into this, Kate," says a voice that's just as hurt and enraged as Derek's but doesn't belong to him.

Stiles turns his head just slightly, not willing to let his attention slip from the total fucking psychopath in front of him, and out the corner of his eye he sees the cavalry arrive.

"Allison?" Stiles calls out. He can't see her--seriously, he's not moving any more than he has to, locked dead still and keeping his aim steady--but the crunch of her kickass boots over dead leaves has a distinctive sound, and the slap of her bow slung over her shoulders.

"Here," she calls up, maybe fifty feet behind them. "And I brought backup."

He exhales, just a little bit, like he can afford to.

"Scott?"

"Among others," she says on the edge of a laugh, as they all fall into line alongside him, following the line of mountain ash he set down as protection.

It's--it's not just the Hunters. She brought Derek’s pack.

Scott nods once and shakes hair out of his eyes, takes a telling place beside Allison, on Stiles' left, and gives the same steady nod to Derek.

Boyd settles in next to Scott, a Hunter beside him looking just slightly uneasy, and Stiles frowns deep enough that he straightens and smiles.

Isaac and Erica make it to the house at a run, half-transformed and distinctly unsubtle in spite of the seven or eight hunters Chris brought. They lope up to Derek and shake the wolfishness away, but there's something energizing about their appearance. Ready for the fight.

Stiles doesn't know what he was expecting, honestly. A small sad part of him thought nobody would come for them, and it would be just him and Derek in this together--he takes a steadying breathe and reminds himself he's put a pin in that, deal with feelings or whatever later when no one's life is on the line--but to have them all here, to have everyone—

"This is how it's going to go, little sister," Chris says, sounding pissed. "You're going to let the Sheriff out of that house, and then the good doctor and I are going to reverse that spell you wound up eight years back.”

She laughs. “And I’ll go to jail, all weak and humany? No thanks, Chris. I’d rather keep the power, but I don’t mind sharing.” She sets her feral grin at Allison. “You want to know how it feels, hon? Want to follow your boyfriend into the dark? I can help.”

“I’ll kill you first,” Scott spits out, and the two of them get in a bitching contest over the line of mountain ash for the next thirty seconds or so. It’s a little contrived to Stiles, but it lasts long enough for his dad to jump out the second-story window into the flatbed of Chris’s truck, so that’s something.

Stiles will have to talk to him later, have to explain all of this. For now he grips Derek’s hand tighter, the signal they agreed on, and watches Derek flick out a lighter from his back pocket.

Kate stops talking, says “What are you— _no_!” but it’s too late, the ground is catching. Stiles reminds himself to get Lydia in to magic lessons with Dr. Deaton soon, because research is one thing but turning rainwater into gasoline is a whole other one, and he’s beyond impressed by her right now.

The house goes up fast, the wolves even faster. Stiles sees the other look away, keeping their places at the ash-line but turning their backs on the smoldering corpses. He doesn’t. Derek does, and he doesn’t blame him.

***

Afterward, when the fire department’s arrived to water down the ashes, when the Hunters have signed a tentative truce with the newly reformed Hale pack, Erica and Isaac and Boyd and Scott crowding in around Derek while Chris lays out the terms of the agreement, when the Sherriff has been settled into the hospital overnight for observation and said “Werewolves,” like he still doesn’t quite believe it, and then cried a little and hugged Stiles and said his mother would be so proud—

When the others have gone for the night, Stiles takes Derek home. His house is empty and dark, but it’s home, and Derek walks through the front door for the first time. They still have to talk about college, about Stiles living on campus next year and now he absolutely cannot have a werewolf stalker breaking into his dorm room. They have to talk about so many things—

But there’ll be time for that later. He lays down on his unmade bed, pulls his werewolf stalker down with him, and they curl together and sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Honey Badger don't care. 
> 
> Not sure how this happened, I accept no blame. Thank you, as always, for reading.


End file.
